As I have said in a thread a while back, twitter is not a communications platform — it is an advertisement platform. There is no “social” media, it’s not possible to be a “person” on something like twitter, only a brand. the twitter company is not interested in having people use their platform actively, to produce content, they are interested in products — brands. “People” are meant only to use it passively.
And I have said, that you would be a fool to treat it otherwise. “Twitter” is not “doing twitter” wrong, you are. There is no point to amassing followers on twitter, unless you have something to sell them. Twitter is a marketing platform, for selling your product-service. Your blog, your podcast, your substack. It is the twitter company’s interest that every tweet is encouraging a commercial act. And if you are within those parameters, those parameters shape you.
You don’t get banned for posting “hateful conduct”. You get banned for being commercially unviable. You get banned for being commercially sub-optimal. You get banned for taking up space that could be used to generate revenue. You get banned for refusing to take your 30 pieces of silver.
The only reason to have a big twitter account is to sell people stuff. I have said so a million times. If you don’t have a product to shill, you shouldn’t use twitter.
My use of twitter has mainly been about killing time and building an audience that eventually, potentially, maybe, theoretically, hypothetically, one day I would exploit for money in some way or another. Set up some kind of scam, a podcast or an e-book. Some kind of future justification — If I use it to shill, eventually, then my use of it will retroactively have been justified, according to my own principles and public statements regarding the nature of these thing.
Because that was an excuse for a way for me to live in the past, and pretend we still lived in the era of content, where you could go online and post a jpg for no other reason than to post a jpg. I am a romantic.
I have often thought to myself that every time I write a thread on twitter, I should just write it on medium. I have often thought to myself that everything I publish on medium I should simultaneously post as a thread underneath the link I post to twitter. Turns out I really should have. If I had been better at monetizing my audience, I would not have been in any danger of getting banned. If you have a podcast, you cannot get banned on twitter.
I have recently thought that I should bite the bullet and do the substack thing. Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll just tweet on medium. Maybe I get lucky and my ban appeal is read by a normal functional adult, capable of the slightest bit of nuance, who is capable of understanding that I don’t LITERALLY think “a black man can become white” and “promoting hatred against stereotypes”. Maybe unicorns are real and maybe I’ll win the lottery.
My parting advice for now to those of you still on twitter: clean up the gutter mouth. It’s literally just “curse words” the algorithm reacts to. Turns out, the basilisk is braindead.
Now I’ll finally have time to read Don Quixote. Don Quixote Book Review Incoming. Subscribe to my Book Review Blogcast “Egg Report 2: Book Report”, for my upcoming book review of the book: “Don Quixote”, a Book.
Hi, can you post some book recommendations? I’m getting deep into postmodernism recently and I need more recs :). I can basically smell the CCRU/Lasch/Baudrillard/Debord on all your writing- would love to hear more about what kinds of books inspire you to think this way. Thanks!
You are one prolific motherfucker my boy. What's this like ~160 [fairly dense on average] essays in three years? Christ in heaven. And I know you're not getting paid right, yet. That's a real writer. A true slave to the muse.